UPDATE 11:45 PM: THE ATLANTIC JUST REMOVED THE SCIENTOLOGY ADVERTORIAL IN THE FACE OF MOUNTING RIDICULE. THEY POSTED THIS NOTICE:
“We have temporarily suspended this advertising campaign pending a review of our policies that govern sponsor content and subsequent comment threads.”
ALSO, The Atlantic took down all 25 comments on its Scientology advertorial, but we nabbed them before they disappeared. We’re reproducing them for posterity below.
AND NOW, the Atlantic has apologized. See the latest update, below.
The Atlantic is a venerated magazine (founded in 1857!) which has been celebrated for the way it has made use of the Internet probably better than any highbrow publication, its AtlanticWire getting high marks for originality and innovation.
But taking paid puff pieces from Scientology? This innovation is resulting in a big backlash.
If you’re unfamiliar with how magazines and newspapers work, we can tell you that AtlanticWire editor Gabriel Snyder may not have known that this piece — which at first glance appears to be a normal article on the website — was coming. As “sponsored content,” the publication of this Scientology-written article would have been worked out with The Atlantic’s sales side, without editorial input. (Mother Jones co-editor Clara Jeffery points out that this advertorial showed up on the main site, not AtlanticWire. Atlantic editor in chief James Bennett is being pelted on Twitter for the ad being published at all.)
In these economic times, print publications and their websites are pretty desperate for any form of revenue. But even if this sponsored advertorial was held at arm’s length from the magazine’s editorial purview, the Atlantic still risks harming its hard-won reputation by getting into bed with such a controversial group as Scientology.
The second half of the series in the Tampa Bay Times about the 2010 FBI investigation of Scientology landed on the Internet tonight, and we’ve given it a good look.
Joe Childs and Tom Tobin have done another fine job amassing new details about the FBI’s probe of human trafficking allegations at Scientology’s facilities, where workers, some of them children, toil long hours for little pay. As in our own story about the FBI giving up, the Times reporters found that at one point the federal investigators were taking seriously the idea of raiding Scientology’s international base east of Los Angeles.
Childs and Tobin advance the story in a major way by consulting experts who explain how the FBI — and the prosecutors it would turn over its evidence to — were confronted with a difficult proposition. Even with evidence that some workers were treated appallingly, Scientology had strong protection in the First Amendment, which keeps courts from meddling in church affairs.
We wrote our own story about that in March 2012. We found that despite talking to many ex-church members who alleged human trafficking abuses, the FBI lost steam and its investigation resulted in no charges being filed. (More recently, we broke the news that the Department of Homeland Security took up where the FBI left off, but also seems to be having issues with its investigation.)
The Times also put together this great 19-minute video about Scientology’s bizarre office-prison for executives, called “The Hole,” and it features interviews with former church spokesman Mike Rinder and former Sea Org worker John Brousseau.
The folks over at NBC’s Rock Center were good enough to send us this promo this afternoon…
…just as we were about to walk into a 3-hour movie. Oh well. So you’ve probably already heard this news. But heck, there’s still plenty of time to talk about how great it is that Paul Haggis talked to Harry Smith about leaving Scientology, and that Larry Wright will also be featured. Some other ex-Scientologists were also interviewed, we hear, but we don’t know if they’ll be included in this show.
Welcome to our ongoing project, where we blog a 1950 first edition of Scientology’s bible, Dianetics, with the help of ex-Scientologist, Bay Area lawyer, and writer Vance Woodward. Go here for the first post in the series.
Last week, we started with the book’s opening sentence, which appears in a ten-page synopsis. That’s followed by a five-page introduction, a three-page guide titled “How to Read This Book,” and then another five-page introduction to Book One.
We now want to speed through all this frontmatter to get to the main course, so we’ll rapidly sum up what’s in it. In the synopsis, the boasting continues after the first sentence, which asserted that the discovery of dianetics was more important than the invention of the wheel…
Just a quick afternoon post to acknowledge that Paul Thomas Anderson’s movie, The Master, garnered three acting Oscar nominations today. (But PTA himself, and his film, got snubbed for Best Director and Best Picture.)
Joaquin Phoenix was nominated for Best Actor for his role as Freddie Quell, Philip Seymour Hoffman was nominated for Best Supporting Actor for playing the L. Ron Hubbard analog Lancaster Dodd (the Master), and Amy Adams received a nomination for Best Supporting Actress in her role as the Master’s wife, Peggy Dodd.
You know what this means — even more media attention aimed at the film and its relationship to the early days of Scientology. Oh, the fun.
Speaking of media announcements, we have one of our own…
If you’ve read Nancy Many’s memoir, My Billion-Year Contract, you know that she had one of the most amazing careers in Scientology — from working directly with church founder L. Ron Hubbard, to spying for the church on its enemies, to running the Celebrity Centre in Los Angeles, and to being sent to the Rehabilitation Project Force prison detail in Florida while she was five months pregnant.
To our amazement, all of that gets covered in the one-hour dramatization of Many’s life which is airing next week on ID, the true-crime sister network of the Discovery Channel, at 10 pm Eastern. The episode kicks off a new ID series called “Dangerous Persuasions,” which portrays good people manipulated into doing bad things. In Canada, the show debuts on January 18 on the History Channel, and will kick off a new series by the name of “Brainwashed.” Well-acted and produced, the detailed and accurate docudrama also features Nancy narrating the story, as you can see in the teaser video the network has posted.
We have more peeks at the program which demonstrate how carefully its producers re-enacted this troubling slice of Scientology history.
Two great excerpts from Lawrence Wright’s upcoming book, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, & the Prison of Belief, have appeared in The Hollywood Reporter today, and they are predictably amazing.
The longer piece looks at Tom Cruise’s relationship with Scientology leader David Miscavige, and Cruise’s wavering relationship to Scientology itself. We’ve taken a stab at those subjects ourselves, but Larry puts everything together in such amazing detail and with such deft touch, you just know the rest of the book is going to be like butter.
The shorter excerpt is about John Travolta, told through his former Scientology handler, Spanky Taylor, who has an amazing story of living through the punishment of the Sea Org’s prison detail, the Rehabilitation Project Force. Wright is the first to get her to speak on the record, ever. Maybe it was his Alabama charm.
Get over there, read those excerpts, and then come back here and give us your thoughts!
Discovery Channel’s true-crime sister network, Investigation Discovery, is airing a 1-hour dramatization of Nancy Many’s amazing life in Scientology next week, at 10 pm on Wednesday, January 16.
Many has been very effective at keeping this a secret, but recently she let us in on it and now that she’s seen the final edit, she’s very happy with how the production turned out.
“Out of the blue I got a request last spring from two separate production companies wanting to put my book in a docudrama format,” Many says, referring to her harrowing account of surviving Scientology’s notorious “Rehabilitation Project Force” and many other experiences in My Billion-Year Contract. She chose a British production company whose executives had some previous experience working on Scientology stories.
Scientology’s “pope” a foul-mouthed, violent bully?
A new book coming out today by BBC newsman John Sweeney makes use of secret electronic communications that portray Scientology’s leader, David Miscavige, berating his underlings in texts with phrases like “You Suck!” and “Counter-Intentional Cock Sucker!” and “You Suck Cock on Hollywood Boulevard!”
Sweeney is famous for blowing up in a temper tantrum while filming his 2007 BBC Panorama special, Scientology and Me, and says he’s wanted for years to write a book about his experiences making that documentary and its followup, 2010’s The Secrets of Scientology.
Now in The Church of Fear: Inside the Weird World of Scientology, Sweeney has done just that, providing a disturbing look at the spying and harassment that he went through making those films, and the electronic communications going on between church operatives as they followed Sweeney and his crew.
